In a recent post on The Social Media Hat entitled 5 Ways to Make Your Blog Posts More Shareable, Mike Allton outlines the critical activities which all bloggers need to embrace in order to stop being a voice in the wilderness and become a widely respected authoritative source of information in your industry sector:

  1. It’s all in the timing. Each platform has its own optimal hours and it goes without saying that the timing is predicated by your subject as well. Do some research into what the optimal time for activity is on your particular social network and use common sense as well. If you’re writing a blog for night clubbers, there’s not much point posting it at 7 am as many of them are just getting to sleep. Keep a keen eye on your social media activity and review it in graph format so you can readily view the spikes and the troughs through the day and even through the week, as weekends have their own particular dynamic.
  2. Spend half your time on the headline. There is a rule in email marketing that you should spend 50% of your time crafting the subject line and preheader as you should in creating the entire rest of the email message. The same proportion applies to your blog, and unless you’re spending as much time working out the best possible headline as you are actually writing your blog, you’re letting yourself and your headlines down. Headlines have to be riveting, exciting, informative, and share-worthy… and you have to cram all of that into seven or eight words. It’s not an easy task but it will pay significant dividends if you’re doing it right.
  3. Give your sharing buttons some respect. It would seem to be common sense to ensure that your social media share buttons are prominently featured on every blog, but you’d be surprised how many bloggers bury them as if they were embarrassed by them, if they place them on their blogs at all. You can’t expect your readers to actually do (gasp) work to share your pearls of wisdom so you have to make it easy on them. You’d also be wise to look at sharing buttons for networks other than the Big Three (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), as there is massive traffic to be found on Pinterest, Google+, and even NewMySpace, if you can get past the Justin Timberlake promos, that is.
  4. CTA is not Chicago Transit Authority. In the prehistoric era of marketing when there actually were salespeople, they were universally trained to “ask for the sale.” Although the traditional salesperson has gone the way of Willy Loman, the validity of the Call To Action (CTA) has never diminished. The bottom line is that your readers are far more likely to perform an action if you directly ask them to. Keep in mind that most of your readers are just scanning your blog so they may miss a CTA if it’s buried in the midst of all your gray text, so try inserting a CTA between paragraphs, at the very end of your blog, or even right at the top.
  5. Apply The Golden Rule. Your readers are not going to share if you’re not sharing, so you have to make a concerted effort to be a fully participating citizen of your online community. The more you like and share, then the wider you’re casting your net within your net-work and you will be duly rewarded by not only your readers but by other bloggers as well, and your notoriety will expand across the inter-net. Bloggers can share through missions on Empire Avenue or by joining tribes on Triberr, and there are as many paradigms as there are social networks. Regardless of the nomenclature, the key aspect of the process is share the work of others and others will share your work. Everybody wins!

So stop wringing your hands over the fact that you’re writing “The Great American Blog” and it’s not drawing flies. Dedicate your time and effort to these five ways and become a ShareMaster!